My younger brother Ron and I were very big for our age. When people told Pop, "You have really good looking boys," Pop would smile and agree: "Yep, they're strong as an ox and nearly as smart."

Monday, December 18, 2006

Al Gore Finds Truth Inconvenient

Going shopping with Al Gore

When I heard Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth warning that Global Warming would increase the sea level twenty feet this century, I got excited. Alice and I live only a few hundred yards from the Pacific shoreline here in Northern California, and oceanfront property is very valuable. I decided to investigate whether we could subdivide our 2.8 acres into six oceanfront lots, worth half a million dollars each at today’s prices.

My dreams of riches were dashed however, when the same scientists Al Gore cites as forming a consensus concerning the effects of man-made Global Warming say nothing of the kind.

Al is not the only one showing London and New York streets covered with ten feet of water, and island nations totally submerged. A television special narrated by Tom Brokaw, Global Warming: What You Need to Know, repeatedly showed scenes of streets covered with water above the tops of their London and New York street signs. Reputable scientists droned on, giving not a hint of dismay that they were flanked by scenes of disaster that no reputable scientific body endorses.

In fact, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just downgraded its predictions as to how much sea levels will rise by 2100 due to Global Warming from 34 inches to an upper estimate of 17 inches. Repeat. Their upper estimate is 17 inches. Since sea levels have been rising four to seven inches each hundred-year period for thousands of years, another way of saying it is that, at worst, Global Warming may raise sea levels an extra foot by 2100.

That leaves Al Gore with 19 feet in his mouth.

How did Al get to the point where he should be a laughing stock, if only he and his followers didn’t take his outrageous predictions so seriously?

The first place to look is at his selective use of science. One of his most memorable inventions is his “hockey stick,” purporting to represent the global temperature trend of the last millennium, and is sometimes credited with representing it back to the birth of Christ. What Al Gore and his supporters don’t mention or admit is that if his hockey stick resembled reality, not even Wayne Gretsky could whack a puck with it. There would be a big bulge near the handle where the Medieval Warm Period should have been charted, then a bulge the opposite way in the middle where the Little Ice Age set the stage to make today’s warming look exceptional in contrast.

Another good place to look for selective science and distortion is the Greenland Ice Cap. Much has been made of the possibility it will all melt catastrophically and flood New York. Putting aside the thought, “OK, so what’s the bad news?” the fact is that Greenland used to be warmer, during the Medieval Warm Period for one example, and as recently as the first half of the 1900’s for another.

Al Gore presents a scenario where the melting Greenland ice cap channels water to its base, which then enables it to slip quickly and catastrophically into the Atlantic. Among many scientific flaws this overlooks is that “The Greenland ice sheet cannot slip into the sea since it is resting in a bowl-shaped depression produced by its own weight, surrounded by mountains which permit only limited glacier outflow to the sea.”

The credulous masses that viewed An Inconvenient Truth are forgiven their ignorance, but shame on the “scientists” that condone it.

More Al Gore-basm links (shamelessly stolen/adapted from Rush) may be found below:(Please mouse click on the red, underlined link titles to be magically transported to the articles described. I'll be glad you did. How you will feel about the process may be something else entirely, but go ahead, take a chance!)